Saina Nehwal: A dignified exit which deserves more noise than it created

Saina Nehwal's quiet admission of her retirement on social media on Tuesday reflected in a way the transient nature of an athlete’s life. It’s been nearly two years that the gamechanger of women’s badminton in India played her last competitive tournament — the Singapore Open in 2023 — before slipping into the wings as a degenerative knee made it impossible to carry on at the international level.

It was a given in badminton circles, as her former personal coach Vimal Kumar admitted to this writer sometime back, that it would be tough for her to attain the level she was once used to. “I entered the sport on my own terms and left on my own terms, so there was no need to announce it,” the 35-year-old told fellow Olympian Gagan Narang during his podcast House of Glory, and it went viral. Yes, she was out of action for all practical purposes but then, one felt her curtain call deserved much more than it received.

A personal call on her part to avoid any spectacle, which would albeit have been an emotional one, more so in the current context when a lot of her personal life came under the media glare. In July 2025, Saina once again took to social media to announce her separation with Parupalli Kashyap, a former international-turned-coach whom she married with much fanfare in 2018. However, there was some heartening news a couple of months down the line when she announced that they were together again to ‘make it work’, and social media mercifully left the couple to themselves.

Perhaps there was a deep sense of hurt and frustration lurking somewhere that the knee injury and arthritis did not permit a fairytale end to her career, but anyone less spunky would have called time on her career after the disastrous outing in Rio 2016. It was the beginning of her tryst with injuries, as she was forced to play despite being diagnosed with a ‘right knee infrapatellar spur displaced fracture with patellar tendon impingement’ barely 10 days before the Games began.

Going into the tournament as a medal contender after her London 2012 bronze, Saina slumped to an upset defeat in the league stages while her younger compatriot P.V. Sindhu went on to a podium finish — a silver after losing the final to Carolina Marin. It was thanks to her indomitable will, which made her journey one of the most transformative in the history of Indian sport, that she was back in business within months, claiming a bronze at the 2017 World Championships and gold in Commonwealth Games the next year.

Looking back, one must also admit that Saina did not shy away from taking one of the toughest calls of her life at the peak of her career — splitting with her childhood coach and mentor Pulella Gopichand barely two years after the Olympic bronze. A lot was made about her differences with someone who was no less than a Dronacharya in her life, but 'Gopi sir' was candid enough to admit later that it was becoming untenable for him to give her his undivided attention as Sindhu and other internationals were under his fold.

Shifting base to Bengaluru under Vimal Kumar, Saina reinvented herself — going on to become world no. 1, claiming a bronze at the 2017 World Championships and gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. However, persistent knee problems meant it was one step forward and two steps back, limiting her ability to train and compete consistently.

In 2024, she disclosed that she had developed ‘arthritis in both knees with significant cartilage erosion’, a condition that made the rigours of international badminton increasingly unmanageable. The writing was on the wall and as Saina admitted during her chat with Narang: “You train eight to nine hours to be the best in the world. Now my knee was giving up in one or two hours. It was swelling and became very tough to push after that.”

Well, Saina has been there and done that, and always given it her all. Her enduring legacy cannot really be measured by any number of titles, a Padma Bhushan or a Rajiv Khel Ratna. Rather, it is about being a barrier-breaker in her sport, who showed the courage to take the Chinese ‘wall’ head-on.

She may have failed more than she succeeded, but if we gloat about a badminton revolution in the country over the last 16-17 years, Saina has certainly played her part.